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Gun Control And Second Amendment Advocates Meet At 'March For Our Lives' Town Hall Meeting

Rachel Hager

At a town-hall style March For Our Lives event in Utah, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students joined local policymakers and Second Amendment rights groups to share ideas about ways to protect students from gun violence.

“We here in Utah are finally ready to have this conversation that had to have happened a long long time ago, the conversation of gun reform,” said Ermiya Fanaeian, a co-founder of March For Our Lives Salt Lake City. 

Fanaeian helped organize Saturday’s town hall where the Utah chapter of the national organization Moms Demand Action volunteered to register voters.

“Our legislators are not listening to the people because the majority of Americans want universal background checks," said Terri Gilfillian, Utah chapter president for Moms Demand Action. "And so we are demanding that they listen to us... these children’s stories and voices are what we’re fighting for.”

Representatives from the Utah Gun Exchange, which serves as an online source for buying, selling and trading guns, have been following the March for Our Lives' Road to Change nationwide tour while driving an armored vehicle. Four days before the Utah event, the original location sponsor pulled out over possible safety concerns.

The co-owner of the Utah Gun Exchange, Sam Robinson, was in the city of Sandy where the tour town hall meeting happened.

“I think that overall it went pretty well, the fact that we had a diversity of groups centered around constitutional issues, people who feel differently and think differently in some ways come together and start to begin the process where we can find common ground and work towards creating safer schools, safer communities in the future is a good thing,” Robinson said. 

After Salt Lake City, the 2018 Road to Change tour continued in Las Vegas on Monday, and is currently in California before heading back to Florida at the end of July.